Low cost per gigabyte. Excellent performance for a SATA SSD. Available in 2.5-inch or M.2 SATA versions. Capacity options from 250GB to 2TB. Long warranty.

Cons

Endurance rating low for usage cases involving heavy data writes.

Bottom Line

An aggressively priced SATA SSD, the Crucial MX500 still manages swift read and write speeds, making it a very good value for upgrading a mainstream laptop or desktop PC.

Not only is an upgrade to a solid state drive (SSD) one of the most effective ways to speed up your aging desktop or laptop, but depending on the capacity and the interface of the drive you select, it can be cheaper than replacing other components. (CPU upgrades often don't make sense without a larger system teardown, and RAM is pricey these days.) That's especially true of the Crucial MX500 ($110 for 500GB, as tested). Not only is this drive cheaper than prestige Serial ATA (SATA) SSDs like the Samsung SSD 860 Pro, but its throughput speeds are hardly slower. As a result, it is one of the best-value SATA drives available for upgrading the storage in a mainstream PC, and it earns our Editors' Choice award.

M.2 or 2.5-Inch, in All the Capacities

The MX500 is available in both M.2 and 2.5-inch varieties, so one type or the other is installable in pretty much any modern PC. Our 500GB review unit is in the 2.5-inch drive form factor, which means it fits in a standard laptop drive bay (for notebooks that still use full-size drives), or in most any desktop chassis. You can also opt for the much smaller M.2 version, which resembles a stick of gum and attaches directly to the motherboard (assuming the motherboard is recent enough to have an M.2 connector; see our guide to the best M.2 SSDs).

No matter which version you choose, performance should mostly be the same, assuming that you're comparing MX500 models of equal capacity. This drive uses the SATA bus, the same as any modern consumer hard drive, instead of PCI Express in concert with the NVMe protocol. Maximum NVMe speeds are roughly six times greater than those that SATA will allow, but the difference isn't readily apparent in everyday computing tasks. (Check out our SSD explainer for more on interfaces, bus types, speeds, and other terms you need to know when buying an SSD.)

Once you've selected the MX500's form factor, you'll need to decide which capacity you need. Crucial offers the MX500 in a wide range of them, from 250GB up to 2TB. In between is a 1TB model, in addition to the 500GB capacity of the review unit here. SSD prices change frequently, but none of the MX500's capacity iterations costs more than 30 cents per gigabyte at this writing, aggressive pricing by mainstream SSD standards. High-performance PCIe NVMe drives tend to circle around 40 cents per gigabyte, and elite-level SATA drives like the Samsung SSD 860 Pro can push 50 cents per gigabyte. These make the MX500 look downright affordable by comparison.

Affordability does mean compromise, however. In the MX500's case, that compromise comes in the form of a lesser endurance rating, or how long the drive is estimated to last before its memory cells start to degrade. Crucial estimates that the 500GB model can sustain up to 180 terabytes written (TBW) before its cells begin to wear out. In absolute terms, that's a relatively low figure, although it's slightly better than the 160TBW that the 525GB version of the Crucial MX300 (the MX500's predecessor) could sustain. The 512GB version of the Samsung SSD 860 Pro, in contrast, is rated for a whopping 600TBW. In general, the higher capacity the drive, the higher its endurance, so the fact that these ratings are all for drives with roughly the same capacity makes the Samsung SSD's sky-high TBW rating that much more impressive.

The MX500's endurance is only cause for concern if you plan to install it in a web server, copy many gigabytes of data to and from your drive every day, edit videos all day long, or expose it to other similar workloads. Crucial points out that 180TBW is the equivalent of writing 98GB per day for five years, an unlikely scenario for a typical consumer laptop or desktop.

The upshot: For most prospective buyers, the MX500 should perform normally for longer than it takes the rest of the PC's components to become obsolete, or the capacity of the SSD itself to become passe. In fact, the drive comes with a five-year warranty, which is the same plan length that Samsung and Western Digital offer for their premium SSDs.

Pushing Against SATA's Ceiling

A speedy SSD offers such a significant boost to system performance because its memory cells allow much faster access to stored data than is possible from a moving drive head, which must seek specific areas on a conventional spinning hard disk drive (HDD) each time you open an app or scroll through a photo album. The MX500 is among the fastest SATA drives we've tested, which means that it will offer a dramatic improvement if you're using it to replace an older HDD.

On the Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential data access test, the SSD recorded read speeds of 563MBps and write speeds of 522MBps. Those are nearly the same results as the much more expensive Samsung SSD 860 Pro (564MBps read, 533MBps write), and they're approaching the theoretical maximum of 600MBps for the current version of the SATA interface.

Sequential speeds are what you'll see advertised on the box or Crucial's website, and while they accurately describe the MX500's maximum potential, you won't necessarily experience them consistently during everyday use. That's because everyday tasks like opening and closing apps, switching between them, and booting up the PC all access files non-sequentially, or randomly. We use Crystal DiskMark's 4K file type tests to approximate these random file access requests. The MX500 delivered 39MBps read speeds on this test and 101MBps write speeds, again closely mirroring the results that the SSD 860 Pro recorded (39MBps read, 111MBps write).

For a second opinion of an SSD's everyday performance, we use the PCMark 8 Storage suite, which simulates how the drive can handle a wide variety of requests, including web browsing, editing photos, and playing video games. Most SSDs score within a few dozen points of 5,000 on this proprietary test, and the MX500 did not disappoint, coming in at 4,988.

Finally, the MX500 is also adept at transferring large files between different locations on the drive. On the AS-SSD Copy Benchmark, it transferred an ISO file at 933MBps, a sample program at 444MBps, and a sample game at 874MBps.

These results are very similar to both the Samsung SSD 860 Pro and the WD Blue 3D. Note, however, that if you do plan to transfer large files or huge folders regularly, you'll want to be aware of the endurance limitations discussed above.

As a budget drive, the Crucial MX500 doesn't come with specialized software to let you fine-tune performance, perform secure erases, and other similar tasks. However, the SSD's firmware is upgradable by downloading the latest version from Crucial's website. The drive also comes bundled with an app from Acronis that lets you clone your existing hard drive, one of the trickiest parts of performing an SSD boot drive upgrade while maintaining your OS installation.

Value-Minded SATA Screamer

Because the Crucial MX500 is a top-performing SATA drive with aggressive pricing, it's a strong choice for most everyday-use situations faced by casual upgraders. Speedy competitors like the Samsung SSD 860 Pro that cost mrore because of their higher endurance ratings are great drives in their own right, but cater to more of a niche upgrade concern. Unless you will be subjecting your drive to significant read and write operations that are outside the scope of ordinary PC activities, the MX500 should stay relevant for as long as or longer than your PC's other components. So there is little reason to shell out more for a drive with a higher endurance rating unless your data-writing habits merit that kind of insurance.

One limitation that the MX500 shares with all SATA drives, however, is the SATA interface's 600MBps throughput limit. If you have a newer high-end motherboard that has a PCI Express-capable M.2 slot, and you're upgrading or building a high-end gaming rig or media-editing workstation, it could be worth spending extra for a PCI Express/NVMe SSD like the WD Black NVMe, which will give you as much as six times the potential throughput that SATA can provide.

For most other consumer usage cases, though, the MX500's performance will more than suffice. That, plus its comprehensive selection of capacities and form factors, and its long warranty, help it snag our Editors' Choice award for budget SSDs.

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About the Author

As a hardware analyst, Tom tests and reviews laptops, peripherals, and much more at PC Labs in New York City. He previously covered the consumer tech beat as a news reporter for PCMag in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where he rode in several self-driving cars and witnessed the rise and fall of many startups. Before that, he worked for PCMag's s... See Full Bio

Crucial MX500

Crucial MX500

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